The
Atlantic cable of 1858 was established to carry instantaneous communications across the
ocean for the first time.

The
manufacture of the cable started in early 1857 and was completed in
June. Before the end of July it was stowed on the American "Niagara" and
the British "Agamemnon" -- both naval vessels lent by their respective
governments for the task.

Although the laying of this first cable was seen as a landmark
event in society, it was a technical failure. It only remained in service a few days. Subsequent
cables laid in 1866 were completely successful and compare to events like the moon landing
of a century later... the cable ... remained in use for almost 100 years.
~ Smithsonian's National
Museum of American History.

1957: Sputnik has launched ARPA

President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the need for the
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) after the Soviet Union's launch of
Sputnik.

1958 - February 7th - In response to the launch of Sputnik, the US Department of Defense issues directive
5105.15 establishing the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

The organization united some of America's most brilliant
people, who developed the United States' first successful satellite in 18 months. Several
years later ARPA began to focus on computer networking and communications technology.

In 1962, Dr. J.C.R. Licklider was chosen to head ARPA's
research in improving the military's use of computer technology. Licklider was a visionary
who sought to make the government's use of computers more interactive. To quickly expand
technology, Licklider saw the need to move ARPA's contracts from the private sector to
universities and laid the foundations for what would become the ARPANET.

The Internet as a tool to create "critical
mass" of the intellectual resources:

To appreciate the import ante the new computer-aided
communication can have, one must consider the dynamics of "critical mass," as it
applies to cooperation in creative endeavor. Take any problem worthy of the name, and you
find only a few people who can contribute effectively to its solution. Those people must
be brought into close intellectual partnership so that their ideas can come into contact
with one another. But bring these people together physically in one place to form a team,
and you have trouble, for the most creative people are often not the best team players,
and there are not enough top positions in a single organization to keep them all happy.
Let them go their separate ways, and each creates his own empire, large or small, and
devotes more time to the role of emperor than to the role of problem solver. The
principals still get together at meetings. They still visit one another. But the time
scale of their communication stretches out, and the correlations among mental models
degenerate between meetings so that it may take a year to do a week’s communicating.
There has to be some way of facilitating communicantion among people wit bout bringing
them together in one place.

The Computer as a Communication Device by J.C.R.
Licklider, Robert W. Taylor, Science and Technology, April 1968.

The visible results of Licklider's approach comes
shortly ...

1969: The first LOGs:
UCLA -- Stanford

According toVinton Cerf,
the UCLA people proposed to DARPA to organize and run a Network Measurement Center for
the ARPANET project...

Around Labor Day in 1969, BBN delivered an Interface
Message Processor (IMP) to UCLA that was based on a Honeywell DDP 516, and when they
turned it on, it just started running. It was hooked by 50 Kbps circuits to two other
sites (SRI and UCSB) in the four-node network: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), UC
Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

The
plan was unprecedented: Kleinrock, a pioneering computer science professor at UCLA, and
his small group of graduate students hoped to log onto the Stanford computer and try to
send it some data.They would start by typing "login," and seeing if the letters
appeared on the far-off monitor:

About one-two years after the first
online demo of how "actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET,
running applications all over the U.S ...." (Vinton Cerf)
the NET became really busy especially "every Friday
night":

Around about 1973 - 1975 I maintained PDP 10 hardware at SRI.
I remember
hearing that there was an ARPANET
"conference" on the Star Trek game every Friday night. Star Trek
was a text
based game where you used photon torpedos and phasers to blast
Klingons. I used to have a pretty cool logical map of the ARPANET
at the time but my ex-wife got it.
(She got everything but the debts.)

The Internet has
changed the way we currently communicate... But could the
Internet have performed the function it was originally designed for?

CNN:
Would the
internet survive nuclear war?

The Internet Post-Apocalypse
There's a common myth that the Internet could survive a nuclear
attack. If the Internet, or pieces of it, did withstand such a war,
how would it be used post-apocalypse? Would the Internet itself be
used to wage war? Would it become a sole source of information for
the surviving masses?

Or would it be too cluttered with dead sites and falsehoods to
be worth anything?

B. Porter - 05:09pm Oct 3, 1998 ET ... It is
very doubtful the Internet would survive ANY sort of large-scale nuclear
attack.... A few years ago a single "surge" in a major West Coast
power line, caused a large portion of the West Coast to be blacked out for
several hours. (If you live on the West Coast you probably remember this.)
The effect of so many power-stations going out at once would be catastrophic
to the power grid for ALL of North America, and Western Europe...

Finally, however, the biggest problem, as was previously mentioned, is the
EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse - ed.) pulse. The first missiles to fly ...
would then explode, at high-altitude.... These explosions would result in an
unprecedented EMP pulse that would cripple virtually 90% (Military estimates
put this at closer to 95% of more) of all electronics in the U.S... Almost
anything with a microchip in it would be gone.... Imagine the effect of
this...

____

D. Callahan- 09:42am
Oct 6, 1998 ET ... This question is somewhat stupid:
In keeping with the Cold War theme, I'll end with a quote from Kruscheve
(spelling): "In a nuclear war-the living will envy the dead..."

The point that I do want to dust off and raise again is that ARPA
wouldn't have happened, if what used to be the Soviet Union hadn't shaken complacent
U.S. awake with a tin can in the sky, Sputnik.

Wars do wonders for the advancement of technology, and
the Cold one was certainly no exception. The way to get a technology advanced is to gather
a lot of really smart people under one roof and get them to concentrate on a single
project. Of course, that takes some organization and money. Where does that come
from? But that's another can of worms - to be opened with relish at a later date. In this
case, it was the only body that had a stake in making sure the Net worked - the
government.

What with the Cold War in full swing and all, the
military, specifically its think tank the Rand Corporation, was concerned that if the war
ever got hot and large chunks of the country were vaporized, those phone lines (not to
mention considerable segments of the population) would be radioactive dust. And the top
brass wouldn't be able to get in touch and carry on. Thus the packets bouncing from node
to node, each of those nodes able to send, receive and pass on data with the same
authority as any other. It was anarchy that worked, and on a technical level, it still
does, obviously.

REWIRED' by David Hudson, JOURNAL OF A STRAINED NET,
August 9th, 1996

Many people don't realize that there is more than a metaphor which
connects the "Information
Superhighway"with the
Interstate Highway System
as the Roads That Were Built By Ike.
"I like Ike"
was an irressistible slogan in 1952.

In 1957, while
responding to the threat of the Soviets in general and the success of Sputnik in
particular, President Dwight Eisenhower created both the Interstate Highway System and the
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA.

By
Steve Driscoll, Online Computer Library Center Inc.

Information
Superhighway: what exactly does it mean?

In Europe:
A term often used by the media to describe the Internet. "The Internet Dictionary",
Bradford, England

In USA: Information
Superhighway / Infobahn: The terms were coined to describe a
possible upgrade to the existing Internet through the use of
fiber optic and/or coaxial cable to allow for high speed data
transmission. This highway does not exist - the Internet of
today is not an information superhighway. "Internet Glossary",
SquareOne Technology

Tipper Gore: "When my husband Vice President Gore served
in the House of Representatives, he coined the phrase "information superhighway"
to describe how this exciting new medium would one day transport us all. Since then, we
have seen the Internet and World Wide Web revolutionize the way people interact, learn,
and communicate."
Photo of Tipper and Al Gore wedding: 20-th
year Before Web (BW)

Gore has become the point man in the
Clinton administration's effort to build a national information highway much as his
father, former Senator Albert Gore, was a principal architect of the interstate highway
system a generation or more earlier.

21 March 1994: Gore's Buenos
Aires "International Telecommunications Union" Speech:
... By means of electricity, the world of
matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of
time ... The round globe is a vast ... brain, instinct with intelligence!"

This was not the observation of a physicist--or a neurologist. Instead, these visionary
words were written in 1851 by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of my country's greatest writers,
who was inspired by the development of the telegraph. Much as Jules Verne foresaw
submarines and moon landings, Hawthorne foresaw what we are now poised to bring into
being...

... I opened by quoting Nathaniel Hawthorne, inspired by Samuel Morse's invention of the
telegraph. Morse was also a famous portrait artist in the U.S.--his portrait of President
James Monroe hangs today in the White House. While Morse was working on a portrait of
General Lafayette in Washington, his wife, who lived about 500 kilometers away, grew ill
and died. But it took seven days for the news to reach him.

In his grief and remorse, he began to wonder if it were possible to erase barriers of time
and space, so that no one would be unable to reach a loved one in time of need. Pursuing
this thought, he came to discover how to use electricity to convey messages, and so he
invented the telegraph and, indirectly, the ITU.

Chapter 2. World Wide Web as
a Side Effectof Particle Physics Experiments.

... Too often we're inclined to perceive the world wide web as strictly an
American phenomenon, and this in spite of the fact that we all know the origins of the web
are European.
It's amazing to us how little emphasis has come to be
placed on the world wide aspect of the world wide web.

April 2, 1996.
blow

The history of every great invention is based on a lot of pre-history. In the case of
the World-Wide Web, there are two lines to be traced: the development of hypertext, or the
computer-aided reading of electronic documents, and the development of the Internet
protocols which made the global network possible.

In the same way that the theory of high energy physics interactions was itself in a
chaotic state up until the early 1970's, so was the so-called area of "Data
Communications" at CERN.

The variety of different techniques, media and protocols
used was staggering; open warfare existed between many manufacturers' proprietary systems,
various home-made systems (including CERN's own "FOCUS" and "CERNET"),
and the then rudimentary efforts at defining open or international standards...

The Stage is Set - early 1980's.

To my knowledge, the first time any "Internet Protocol" was used at CERN was
during the second phase of the STELLA Satellite Communication Project, from 1981-83, when
a satellite channel was used to link remote segments of two early local area networks
(namely "CERNET", running between CERN and Pisa, and a Cambridge Ring network
running between CERN and Rutherford Laboratory). This was certainly inspired by the ARPA
IP model, known to the Italian members of the STELLA collaboration (CNUCE, Pisa) who had
ARPA connections...

TCP/IP Introduced at CERN.

In August, 1984 I wrote a proposal to the SW Group Leader, Les Robertson,
for the establishment of a pilot project to install and evaluate TCP/IP protocols on some
key non-Unix machines at CERN including the central IBM-VM mainframe and a VAX VMS
system....

By 1990 CERN had become the largest Internet site in Europe and this fact,
as mentioned above, positively influenced the acceptance and spread of Internet techniques
both in Europe and elsewhere...

The Web Materializes.

A key result of all these happenings was that by 1989 CERN's Internet
facility was ready to become the medium within which Tim Berners-Lee would cle

By Ben M. Segal / CERN PDP-NS / April, 1995

The WWW's Baker:
Who is this Guy?

Ben
Segal: I'm
British, graduated in Physics and Mathematics in 1958 from Imperial College, London,
then worked for the UK Atomic Energy Authority and later in the USA
for the Detroit Edison Company on fast breeder reactor development.
I've been at CERN since 1971, after finishing my Ph.D. at
Stanford University in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering...

Except
for a sabbatical in 1977, when I worked at Bell Northern Research in
Palo Alto on a PABX development project (and encountered UNIX for
the first time), CERN has kept me pretty busy on five main projects
, including the coordinated introduction of the Internet Protocols
at CERN beginning in 1985.

What does it mean: CERN? We've received
this question from one of our readers:

You give no explanation of the acronym CERN beyond "European Laboratory for Particle
Physics". Could you insert the correct name somewhere?

forwarded it to Ben and have got the following answer :

... the acronym "CERN" stands for "Centre European pour la Recherche
Nucleaire", the original French name of the organization.
More recently it was felt that "Nucleaire" implied reactor or even military
applications, so the name of the organization was changed to the ""European
color="#400040" y for Part color="#400040" icle Physics" but the acronym was left as it was.
Confusing, isn't it?

~ Ben Segal

Why the WWW was born in CERN:

CERN is now the world's largest research laboratory with over 50%of all the active
particle physicists in the world taking part in over 120 different research projects. 3000
staff members, 420 young students and fellows supported by the Organization and 5000
visiting physicists, engineers, computer experts and scientists specializing in a variety
of front-line technologies are collaborating with CERN from 40 countries and 371
scientific institutions .

Binding together the creativity of so many different nationalities, backgrounds and fields
of research...

... has established CERN as the global centre for High Energy Physics and set a precedent
in scientific collaboration which has been followed by Europe's other fundamental research
organizations (ESO, ESA, EMBL, ESRF)...

"Scientific research lives and flourishes in an atmosphere of freedom - freedom to
doubt, freedom to enquire and freedom to discover. These are the conditions under which
this new laboratory has been established"; these were the words written in 1954 by
Sir Ben Lockspeiser, first President of the CERN Council. This is the atmosphere in which
CERN has flourished for 40 years and in which the Organization looks forward to continuing
successfully into the future.

Web as a "Side Effect"of the 40 years of Particle Physics Experiments.

Below is our email exchange with Ben Segal:

It happened many times during history of science that the most impressive
results of large scale scientific efforts appeared far away from the main directions of
those efforts.

I hope you agree that Web was a side effect of the CERN's scientific
agenda.

After the World War 2 the nuclear centers of almost all developed countries became the
places with the highest concentration of talented scientists.

For about four decades many of them were invited to the international CERN's Laboratories.

So specific kind of the CERN's intellectual "entire culture" (as you called it)
was constantly growing from one generation of the scientists and engineers to another.

When the concentration of the human talents per square foot of the CERN's Labs reached the
critical mass, it caused an intellectual explosion

The Web, -- crucial point of human's history, was born...

Nothing could be compared to it.
You wrote the best about it: "synergy, serendipity and coincidence"...

We cant imagine yet the real scale of the recent shake, because there has
not been so fast growing multi-dimension social-economic processes in human history...

P.S. It is quite remarkable that "Highlights of
CERN History: 1949 - 1994" do not have a word about Web. So, it looks like a
classic side effect that normally is not be mentioned at the main text of official
record...

>I hope you agree that Web was a side effect of the CERN's scientific agenda.

Absolutely! (And it was not 100% appreciated by the masters of CERN, the physicists and
accelerator builders, that such a "side effect" with world shaking consequences
was born in the obscure bit of the organization that handled computing, a relatively
low-status activity...).

The first web client and server -- built with NEXTSTEP. The WWW project was originally developed to provide a
distributed hypermedia system which could easily access -- from any desktop computer --
information spread across the world. The web includes standard formats for text, graphics,
sound, and video which can be indexed easily and searched by all networked machines.
Using NeXT's object-oriented technology, the first Web
server and client machines were built by CERN -- the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics in November 1990. Since then the Web has truly encompassed the globe and access
has proliferated across all computer platforms in both the corporate and home markets.

Source: NeXT Software, Inc., 1996

The Web as a NextStep of PC
Revolution.

On the road to World Wide Web’s
development, the baton was thus passed from Steven Paul Jobs,
co-founder of the Apple that ignited the PC revolution, to Tim
Berners-Lee, co-inventor of the WWW.

The below following text is
the quotation from "Steve
Paul Jobs" biography. By Lee Angelelli, Undergraduate
Student, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Fall 1994.
(Assignment as part of the requirements for the course
"Professionalism in Computing", CS 3604), very lightly edited
by J.A.N. Lee

... Over the past seven years of Apple's creation, Jobs had created a strong productive
company with a growth curve like a straight line North with no serious competitors. From
1978 to 1983, its compound growth rate was over 150% a year. Then IBM muscled into the
personal computer business. Two years after introducing its PC, IBM passed Apple in dollar
sales of the machines. IBM's dominance had made its operating system an industry standard
which was not compatible with Apple's products.

Jobs knew in order to compete with IBM, he would have to make the Apple compatible with
IBM computers and needed to introduce new computers that could be marketed in the business
world which IBM controlled. [Morrison, 1984, p. 86]

To help him market these new computers Jobs recruited John Sculley from Pepsi Cola for a
position as president at Apple.

Jobs enticed Scully to Apple with a challenge:
"If you stay at Pepsi, five years from now all you'll have accomplished is selling a
lot more sugar water to kids. If you come to Apple you can change the world."
[Gelman and Rogers, 1985, p. 46], [Conant and Marbach, 1984, p. 56]

...As the Macintosh took off in sales and became a big hit, John Sculley felt Jobs was
hurting the company, and persuaded the board to strip him of power.

John Sculley tried to change the discipline of the company by controlling costs, reducing
overhead, rationalizing product lines to an organization that some in the industry called
Camp Runamok. [Morrison, 1984, p. 90]

Sculley came to the conclusion that "we could run a lot better with Steve out of
operations," he says. [Gelman and Rogers, 1985, p. 46]

Jobs tended to value technological "elegance" over customer needs which is a
costly luxury at a time of slowing sales. And Jobs's intense involvement with the
Macintosh project had a demoralizing effect on Apple's other divisions.
[Gelman and Rogers, 1985, p. 47]

He planned to build the next generation of personal computers that would put Apple
to shame.

It did not happen. After eight long years of struggle and after running through some $250 million, NextStep
closed down its hardware division in 1993.

Jobs realized that he was not going to revolutionize the hardware. He turned his attention
to the software side of the computer industry...

Comments to: "...NextStep closed down
its hardware division in 1993. Jobs realized that he was not going to revolutionize the
hardware."

Before this sad event has happened lots of the NeXT machines successfully infiltrated into
an elite area of the IT professional community and has created the new level of computer
culture. One of these machines was the
"Tim's NeXT machine "
,
that was used as a detonator of the WorldWideWeb explosion (G.R.G. -- 1996).

... HyperText is a way to link and access information of
various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at
will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of
information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation
and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating
servers already available at CERN.

The project has two phases: firstly we make use of existing
software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for
the user's workstations, based on an analysis of the requirements
for information access needs by experiments. Secondly, we extend the
application area by also allowing the users to add new material.

Phase one should take 3 months with the full manpower complement,
phase two a further 3 months, but this phase is more open-ended, and
a review of needs and wishes will be incorporated into it.

The manpower required is 4 software engineers and a programmer,
(one of which could be a Fellow). Each person works on a specific
part (eg. specific platform support).

Each person will require a state-of-the-art workstation , but
there must be one of each of the supported types. These will cost
from 10 to 20k each, totalling 50k. In addition, we would like to
use commercially available software as much as possible, and foresee
an expense of 30k during development for one-user licences, visits
to existing installations and consultancy.

We will assume that the project can rely on some computing
support at no cost: development file space on existing development
systems, installation and system manager support for daemon
software.

. . . . . . .

Abstract:
HyperText is a way to link and access information of various
kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will.
Potentially, HyperText provides a single user-interface to many
large classes of stored information such as reports, notes,
data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help. We
propose the implementation of a simple scheme to incorporate
several different servers of machine-stored information already
available at CERN, including an analysis of the requirements for
information access needs by experiments. Introduction:
The current incompatibilities of the platforms and tools make it
impossible to access existing information through a common
interface, leading to waste of time, frustration and obsolete
answers to simple data lookup. There is a potential large
benefit from the integration of a variety of systems in a way
which allows a user to follow links pointing from one piece of
information to another one. This forming of a web of information
nodes rather than a hierarchical tree or an ordered list is the
basic concept behind HyperText.At CERN, a variety of data is already available: reports,
experiment data, personnel data, electronic mail address lists,
computer documentation, experiment documentation, and many other
sets of data are spinning around on computer discs continuously.
It is however impossible to "jump" from one set to another in an
automatic way: once you found out that the name of Joe Bloggs is
listed in an incomplete description of some on-line software, it
is not straightforward to find his current electronic mail
address. Usually, you will have to use a different lookup-method
on a different computer with a different user interface. Once
you have located information, it is hard to keep a link to it or
to make a private note about it that you will later be able to
find quickly.

Hypertext concepts: ... A program which provides access
to the hypertext world we call a
browser. When starting a
hypertext browser on your workstation, you will first be
presented with a
hypertext page which is personal to you
: your personal notes, if you like. A hypertext page has pieces
of text which refer to other texts. Such references are
highlighted and can be selected with a mouse (on dumb terminals,
they would appear in a numbered list and selection would be done
by entering a number). When you select a reference, the browser
presents you with the text which is referenced: you have made
the browser follow a hypertext link ...T. Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau

W W Why
are they green? "Because I see all "W"s
as green..."

Robert Cailliau: Recently I discovered that I'm a synaesthetic. Well,
I've known it for a long time, but I did not realise
that there was a name for it. I'm one of those people
who combine two senses: for me, letters have colours.

Only about one in 25'000 have this condition, which is
perfectly harmless and actually quite useful. Whenever I
think of words, they have colour patterns. For example,
the word "CERN" is yellow, green, red and brown, my
internal telephone number, "5005" is black, white,
white, black. The effect sometimes works like a spelling
checker: I know I've got the right or the wrong number
because the colour pattern is what I remember or not...

And now wait for it folks: you have all seen the
World-Wide Web logo ofthree superimposed "W"s. Why are
they green? Because I see all "W"s as green... It would
look horrible to me if they were any other colour. So, it's not because it is a "green" technology,
although I also like that...

So, here I am: twenty years of work at CERN: control
engineering, user-interfaces, text processing,
administrative computing support, hypertexts and finally the Web.

The Web
timeline according to R. Cailliau:

1990

CERN: A Joint proposal
for a hypertext system is presented to the management.

Mike Sendall buys a
NeXT cube for evaluation, and gives it to Tim. Tim's
prototype implementation on NeXTStep is made in the
space of a few months, thanks to the qualities of the
NeXTStep software development system. This prototype
offers WYSIWYG browsing/authoring! Current Web browsers
used in "surfing the Internet" are mere passive windows,
depriving the user of the possibility to contribute.

During some sessions
in the CERN cafeteria, Tim and I try to find a catching
name for the system. I was determined that the name
should not yet again be taken from Greek mythology. Tim
proposes "World-Wide Web". I like this very much, except
that it is difficult to pronounce in French...

1991

The prototype is very
impressive, but the NeXTStep system is not widely
spread. A simplified, stripped-down version (with no
editing facilities) that can be easily adapted to any
computer is constructed: the Portable "Line-Mode
Browser".

SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
in California, becomes the first Web server in USA.

It serves the contents
of an existing, large data base of abstracts of physics
papers.

Distribution of
software over the Internet starts.

The Hypertext'91
conference (San Antonio) allows us a "poster"
presentation (but does not see any use of discussing
large, networked hypertext systems...).

1992

The Gopher system from
the University of Minnesota, also networked, simpler to
install, but with no hypertext links, spreads rapidly.

We need to make a Web
browser for the X system, but have no in-house
expertise. However, Viola (O'Reilly Assoc., California)
and Midas (SLAC) are wysiwyg implementations that create
great interest.

The world has 50 Web
servers!

Some of the other viewpoints on
the first 5 years of the Web:

... as Tim
Berners-Lee and other Web developers enriched
the standard for structuring data, programmers
around the world began to enrich the browsers.

One of these programmers was Marc Andreessen,
who was working for the NCSA in
Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.

In January 1993, Andreessen released a version
of his new, handsome, point-and-click graphical
browser for the Web, designed to run on Unix
machines.

In August, Andreessen and his co-workers at the
center released free versions for Macintosh and
Windows.

In December, a long story about the Web and
Mosaic appeared in The New York Times...

The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has
Begun, By Gary Wolf, Wired 2.10

In the Web's
firstgeneration, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform
Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol
(HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based
servers and browsers. A few people noticed that the
Web might be better than Gopher.

In thesecond generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of
Illinois. Several million then suddenly noticed that the Web might be better than sex.

In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left
NCSA to found Netscape...

Ether Microsoft and Netscape open some new
fronts in escalating Web Wars, By Bob Metcalfe,
InfoWorld, August 21, 1995, Vol. 17, Issue 34.

Meanwhile -- between
all these 3 generations --
a lot of historical scale events happened. Eric W. Sink
clarifies some of them:

Life in the browser wars was a unique
time period for me in my career...

I started work on Spyglass Mosaic on April
5th, 1994. The demo for our first prospective
customer was already on the calendar in May. ...
Yes, we licensed the technology and trademarks
from NCSA (at the University of Illinois), but
we never used any of the code. We wrote our
browser implementations completely from scratch,
on Windows, MacOS, and Unix.

... Netscape didn't even exist yet, but
things happened fast. Just a few weeks after I
started coding, Jim Clark rode into town and
gathered a select group of programmers from
NCSA. Mosaic Communications Corporation was
born. It was interesting to note that certain
people on the NCSA browser team were not invited
to the special meeting. I can still remember
hearing about how ticked off they were to be
excluded. Champaign-Urbana is a very small town.

Spyglass had the legal right to the "Mosaic"
trademark. A few tantrums and lots of lawyering
later, MCC changed its name to Netscape.

We thought we had a nice head start on
Netscape. We had a really top-notch team and we
moved the rest of our developers over to browser
work quickly. We were ready to compete with
anybody. But Jim Clark was, after all, Jim
Clark. His SGI-ness knew how to work the
advantages of being in Silicon Valley. He
provided his young company with lots of press
coverage and very deep pockets.

We decided to approach this market with an
OEM business model. Instead of selling a browser
to end users we developed core technology and
sold it to corporations who in turn provided it
to their end users. We considered ourselves to
be the arms dealer for the browser wars.
Over 120 companies licensed Spyglass Mosaic so
they could bundle it into their product. Our
stuff ended up in books, operating systems, ATM
machines, set-top boxes, help systems, and
kiosks. It was an extremely profitable business.
The company grew fast and ours was one of the
first Internet IPOs.

Along the way, we got involved in the
standards process. In fact, I became the chair
of the IETF HTML Working Group for the
standardization of HTML 2.0. I learned a lot
through this experience. In May 1994 I went to
the first WWW conference in Geneva, Tim
Berners-Lee took me aside and shared his plans
for a World-Wide Web Consortium. It didn't take
too long for the W3C to become the venue for
HTML standards discussions. Eventually this was
A Good Thing. Both Netscape and Microsoft became
active participants in the W3C HTML Working
Group. Any group which didn't have their
involvement was doomed to irrelevance.

For much of 1994, it seemed like we were
ahead of Netscape. Shortly after we released our
2.0 version, I remember one of the Netscape
developers griping about how their schedule had
been moved up by six months. We smiled because
we knew we were the reason. They had not been
taking us seriously and they were being forced
to do so.

But Netscape was running at a much faster
pace. They got ahead of us on features and they began to give their browser away at no cost
to end users. This made Netscape the
standard by which all other browsers were
judged. If our browser didn't render something
exactly like Netscape, it was considered a bug.
I hated fixing our browser to make it
bug-compatible with Netscape even though we
had already coded it to "the standard". Life's
not fair sometimes.

We won the Microsoft deal. I suppose only the
higher echelons of Spyglass management really
know the gory details of this negotiation. I was
asked to be the primary technical contact for
Microsoft and their effort to integrate our
browser into Windows 95. I went to Redmond and
worked there for a couple of weeks as part of
the "Chicago" team. It was fun, but weird. They
gave me my own office. At dinner time, everyone
went to the cafeteria for food and then went
back to work. On my first night, I went back to
my hotel at 11:30pm. I was one of the first to
leave.

Internet Explorer 2.0 was basically Spyglass
Mosaic with not too many changes. IE 3.0 was a
major upgrade, but still largely based on our
code. IE 4.0 was closer to a rewrite, but our
code was still lingering around -- we could tell
by the presence of certain esoteric bugs that
were specific to our layout engine.

Licensing our browser was a huge win for
Spyglass. And it was a huge loss. We got a loud
wake-up call when we tried to schedule our
second conference for our OEM browser customers.
Our customers told us they weren't coming
because Microsoft was beating them up. The
message became clear: We sold our browser
technology to 120 companies, but one of them
slaughtered the other 119.

The time between IE 3 and IE 4 was a defining
period for Spyglass. It was clear that the
browser war had become a two-player race.

- Even with our IPO stash, we didn't have
the funding to keep up with Netscape.- What was interesting was the day we
learned that Netscape didn't have the
funding to keep up with Microsoft.

For the development of IE 4.0, a new Program
Manager appeared. His name was Scott Isaacs and
I started seeing him at the HTML standards group
meetings. At one of those meetings we sat down
for a talk which was a major turning point for
me and for Spyglass. Scott told me that the IE team had over 1,000 people.

I was stunned. That was 50 times the size of
the Spyglass browser team. It was almost as many
people as Netscape had in their whole company. I
could have written the rest of the history of
web browsers on that day -- no other outcomes
were possible ...

According to Gary
Wolf, "Andreessen also left the NCSA, departing in
December 1993 with the intention of abandoning Mosaic
development altogether. He moved to California and took
a position with a small software company. But within a
few months he had quit his new job and formed a
partnership with SGI founder Jim Clark.

"At the NCSA," Andreessen explains, "the deputy director
suggested that we should start a company, but we didn't
know how. We had no clue. How do you start something
like that? How do you raise the money? Well, I came out
here and met Jim, and all of a sudden the answers
starting falling into place."

In March, Andreessen and Clark flew back to Illinois,
rented a suite at the University Inn, and invited about
half a dozen of the NCSA's main Mosaic developers over
for a chat. Clark spent some time with each of them
alone. By May, virtually the entire ex-NCSA development
group was working for Mosaic Communications.

Andreessen answers accusations that corporate Mosaic
Communications "raided" nonprofit NCSA by pointing out
that with the explosion of commercial interest in
Mosaic, the developers were bound to be getting other
offers to jump ship. "We originally were going to fly
them out to California individually over a period of
several weeks," Andreessen explains, "but Jim and I
said, Waita second, it does not make much sense to leave
them available to be picked up by other companies. So we
flew out to Illinois at the spur of the moment."

Since Mosaic Communications now has possession of the
core team of Mosaic developers from NCSA, the company
sees no reason to pay any licensing fees for NCSA
Mosaic. Andreessen and his team intend to rewrite the
code, alter the name, and produce a browser that looks
similar and works better.

The Anti-Gates

Clark and Andreessen have different goals. For Jim
Clark, whose old company led the revolution in high-end
digital graphics, Mosaic Communications represents an
opportunity to transform a large sector of the computer
industry a second time. For Andreessen, Mosaic
Communications offers a chance to keep him free from the
grip of a company he sees as one of the forces of
darkness - Microsoft.

"If the company does well, I do pretty well," says
Andreessen. "If the company doesn't do well" - his voice
takes on a note of mock despair - "I work at Microsoft."

The chair of Microsoft is anathema to many young
software developers, but to Andreessen he is a
particularly appropriate nemesis...

As I ( ) reviewed my notes from interviews with
Andreessen, I was struck by the thought that he may have
conjured the Bill Gates nemesis out of the subtle miasma
of his own ambivalence. After all it is he, not the
programmers in Redmond, Washington, who is writing a
proprietary Web browser. It is he, not Bill Gates, who
is at the center of the new, ambitious industry. It is
he who is being forced by the traditional logic of the
software industry to operate with a caution that verges
on secrecy, a caution that is distinctly at odds with
the open environment of the Web."

The (Second Phase
of the) Revolution Has Begun, By Gary Wolf, Wired 2.10

There are
two ages of the Internet - before Mosaic, and after. The
combination of Tim Berners-Lee's Web protocols, which
provided connectivity, and Marc Andreesen's browser,
which provided a great interface, proved explosive. In
twenty-four months, the Web has gone from being unknown
to absolutely ubiquitous.

A
Brief History of Cyberspace, by Mark
Pesce, ZDNet, October 15, 1995

Bill
Gates, "...an Internet browser is a trivial piece of
software. There are at least 30 companies that have
written very credible Internet browsers, so that's
nothing..."

The world according to Gates By Don
Tennant, InfoWorld Electric, Jan 4,
1996.

"The most
important thing for the Web is stay ahead of
Microsoft."

Steve Jobs. Wired, February 1996, p.162

Microsoft may
still be No. 2 in the Internet race, but it's
rapidly closing the gap. What's more, Microsoft
has forgotten more about PR and marketing than
Netscape ever learned.

The contrast between the two companies was
highlighted the day after Clark induced mass
sedation when Microsoft's group vice president,
Paul Maritz, wowed the crowd with the kind of
polished, four-star presentation that the
Redmondians seem to be able to do with their
eyes closed.

Just like his boss, Maritz promised a lot of
stuff that's still not here. But he generated
excitement and energy and buzz. The upshot was
to create the kind of halo effect that will pay
dividends when it comes time for developers and
corporate shoppers to make their buying and
investment decisions. ....

Of
Silicon Valley and Sominex, by Charles
Cooper, PC Week, June 5, 1996.

Slate
Magazine, June 26, 1996: Is Microsoft Evil? Mark Andreessen: I don't think it's a matter of good and evil -- Microsoft is a a competitor, and a smart one.
Jim (Clark) and I both think it's important to point
out what Microsoft is doing in various areas, since
they are very good at using FUD [fear, uncertainty,
doubt] to attempt to paralize the market.

Why
Bill Gates wants to be the next Marc
Andreessen, Wired, 3.12,
p.236.

"God
is on the side of the big battalions." said
Napoleon.
Very few times in warfare have smaller forces
overtaken bigger forces...

Netscape's Jim Barksdale, Wired 4.03 March 1996

December,
1995: i-Pearl Harbor

"Pearl Harbor
Day." Time Magazine reported it when Bill Gates declared
war on December 7,
1995... By Jeff Sutherland

February,
1996: 2-year Prediction

Steve
Jobs: We have a two-year window. If
the Web doesn't reach ubiquity in the next
two years, Microsoft will own it. And that
will be the end of it.

Wire,
February 1996, p.162

June,
1996: "How many ...?"

Question
: Netscape has certainly come on awfully strong. Bill Gates: How many software developers do you think
they have?

The world
according to Gates By Don Tennant, InfoWorld Electric,
Jan 4, 1996

The turn-point in the Browser's WarThe Web Browser
market share dramatically changed for a couple of month:

. . . . .As an ISP, I want to give my customers a
software package for their use. I contacted
Netscape.

- They said they would let be customize and
repackage their product, if I committed to
buy 2500 the first year at $17 each.

I said OK, I can do that.

- Then they said, great please send your
check for 50% of the moneys due.

That's $21,250. As a small ISP I dont have
that available without dipping into my
reserves.

I am then contacted by Microsoft and was
told they would send me this really nice
customization kit, which will build a
release for Win95, Win NT, Win3.1 and
install Explorer 3, Netmeeting, a commercial
TCP dialer and stack. And it has a automated
user sign up server built into it.

It will build a CD Rom image, if I want to
distribute that way. It configures with a wizard in about 5
minutes. It's seamless and a really good piece of
software and installer.

I said that it sounded great, how much?
- No charge. Distribute it all you want to
your customers. Have fun.

Microsoft is such a monster company that
they can drop multi millions into
development of a product package that they
will give away.

Netscape on the other hand actually wants to
make a bit of money on their product.

Thinking of myself first, I took the
Microsoft software. So will most other ISP's...

50
years of HYPERTEXT concept's EVOLUTION
The Foundation of World Wide Web
Science

Hypertext Timeline

1945:
Vannevar Bush (Science Advisor to
president Roosevelt during WW2) proposes
Memex -- a conceptual machine that can
store vast amounts of information, in
which users have the ability to create
information trails, links of related
texts and illustrations, which can be
stored and used for future reference.

"As We
May Think " This article was
originally published in the July 1945
issue of The Atlantic Monthly... Like
Emerson's famous address of 1837 on ``The
American Scholar,'' this paper by
Vannevar Bush calls for a new
relationship between thinking man and
the sum of our knowledge.

The Vannevar Bush's hyperlink
concept:

Our ineptitude in getting at the record
is largely caused by the artificiality
of systems of indexing. When data of any
sort are placed in storage, they are
filed alphabetically or numerically, and
information is found (when it is) by
tracing it down from subclass to
subclass. It can be in only one place,
unless duplicates are used; one has to
have rules as to which path will locate
it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having
found one item, moreover, one has to
emerge from the system and re-enter on a
new path.

The human mind does not work
that way. It operates by association.

With one
item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to
the next that is suggested by the
association of thoughts, in accordance
with some intricate web of trails
carried by the cells of the brain.

It has other characteristics, of course;
trails that are not frequently followed
are prone to fade, items are not fully
permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the
speed of action, the intricacy of
trails, the detail of mental pictures,
is awe-inspiring beyond all else in
nature.

Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this
mental process artificially, but he
certainly ought to be able to learn from
it. In minor ways he may even improve,
for his records have relative
permanency.

The first idea, however, to be drawn
from the analogy concerns selection.
Selection by association, rather than by
indexing, may yet be mechanized. One
cannot hope thus to equal the speed and
flexibility with which the mind follows
an associative trail, but it should be
possible to beat the mind decisively in
regard to the permanence and clarity of
the items resurrected from storage.

Wholly new forms of
encyclopedias will appear,
ready-made with a mesh of
associative trails running
through them, ready to be
dropped into the memex
and there amplified. The lawyer
has at his touch the associated
opinions and decisions of his
whole experience, and of the
experience of friends and
authorities. The patent attorney
has on call the millions of
issued patents, with familiar
trails to every point of his
client's interest. The
physician, puzzled by its
patient's reactions, strikes the
trail established in studying an
earlier similar case, and runs
rapidly through analogous case
histories, with side references
to the classics for the
pertinent anatomy and histology.
The chemist, struggling with the
synthesis of an organic
compound, has all the chemical
literature before him in his
laboratory, with trails
following the analogies of
compounds, and side trails to
their physical and chemical
behavior...

By Vannevar Bush
- As We May Think - The
Atlantic Monthly, July
1945

1965:
Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext

By 'hypertext' mean
nonsequential writing - text
that branches and allows
choice to the reader, best
read at an interactive
screen.

Ted Nelson, Literary
Machines

1967: Andy van Dam and others build
the Hypertext Editing System ...

The first working
hypertext system was
developed at Brown
University, by a team led by
Andries van Dam.
The Hypertext Editing System
ran in 128K memory on an
IBM/360 mainframe and was
funded by IBM, who later
sold it to the Houston
Manned Spacecraft Center,
where it was used to produce
documentation for the Apollo
space program.

The Hypertext Editing
System (1967) and FRESS
(1968) ,
by dr. P.M.E. De Bra

The
words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" were
coined by my friend Ted Nelson in a
paper to the ACM 20th national
conference in 1965, before I (Andrew
Pam) was even born! Although I had come
across occasional articles Ted had
written for Creative Computing magazine,
my first exposure to his legendary
Xanadu project did not occur until 1987
when I purchased the Microsoft Press
second edition of his classic book
Computer Lib / Dream Machines... , which
outlined his idea of a "docuverse" or
universal library of multimedia
documents.

As an avid science fiction reader, my
imagination had already been captured by
this idea of a universally accessible
computer storage and retrieval system as
presented in the 1975 novel Imperial
Earth by Arthur C. Clarke... But here
was someone actually involved in trying
to create such a system. I immediately
sent off a US$100 donation to Project
Xanadu to reserve a Xanadu account name,
and also purchased the 1988 edition of
Ted's self-published book Literary
Machines... and the Technical Overview
video describing the Xanadu project in
detail...

By
Andrew Pam, Xanadu Australia

All the children of Nelson's
imagination do not have
equal stature. Each is
derived from the one, great,
unfinished project for which
he has finally achieved the
fame he has pursued since
his boyhood. During one of
our (Gary Wolf) many
conversations, Nelson
explained that he never
succeeded as a filmmaker or
businessman because "the
first step to anything I
ever wanted to do was Xanadu."

Xanadu, a global hypertext
publishing system, is the
longest-running vaporware
story in the history of the
computer industry.

It has been in development
for more than 30 years.

This long gestation period
may not put it in the same
category as the Great Wall
of China, which was under
construction for most of the
16th century and still
failed to foil invaders,
but, given the relative
youth of commercial
computing, Xanadu has set a
record of futility that will
be difficult for other
companies to surpass.

The fact that Nelson has had
only since about 1960 to
build his reputation as the
king of unsuccessful
software development makes
Xanadu interesting for
another reason: the
project's failure (or,
viewed more optimistically,
its long-delayed success)
coincides almost exactly
with the birth of hacker
culture.

Xanadu's manic and highly
publicized swerves from
triumph to bankruptcy show a
side of hackerdom that is as
important, perhaps, as tales
of billion-dollar companies
born in garages.

Among people who consider
themselves insiders,
Nelson's Xanadu is sometimes
treated as a joke, but this
is superficial. Nelson's
writing and presentations
inspired some of the most
visionary computer
programmers, managers, and
executives - including
Autodesk Inc. founder John
Walker - to pour millions of
dollars and years of effort
into the project.

Xanadu was meant to be a
universal library, a
worldwide hypertext
publishing tool, a system to
resolve copyright disputes,
and a meritocratic forum for
discussion and debate.

By putting all information
within reach of all people,
Xanadu was meant to
eliminate scientific
ignorance and cure political
misunderstandings.

And, on the very hackerish
assumption that global
catastrophes are caused by
ignorance, stupidity, and
communication failures,
Xanadu was supposed to save
the world.

The Curse of Xanadu, by
Gary Wolf, Wired 3.06

In the poem "Kubla Khan", by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, a "magic place of
literary memory" appears and is called
Xanadu. The Xanadu vision of Ted Nelson
was to create a unified literary
environment on a global scale, a
repository for everything that anybody
has ever written.

Ted Nelson and Xanadu, by Paul De
Bra

We
call the whole system of publication
"open hypermedia publishing" because
anyone can link to, and re-use,
materials of any kind throughout the
network.

We
believe that Xanadu Open Hypermedia
Publishing is the publishing medium
of the future, combining all forms
of media -- text, graphics, audio
and music, video, simulations, data
structures -- into tomorrow's new
information world.

By Ted
Nelson. Xanadu:
The Information Future.

If
you think you're living
in a revolutionary
period now, wait till
you start getting
unsolicited e-mail from
the Bolsheviks or Mao,
or find yourself on
Catherine the Great's
home page. World Wide Web will
sound like an awfully
modest enterprise.
You laugh? Go ahead. They laughed at Galileo... Not to mention the
Internet.

Chapter 6: Living History of HypertextTheodor Holm Nelson:
The Fate of
Thinking Person in Silicon Valley

1960. It
occurs to me that the future of humanity is
at the interactive computer screen, that the
new writing and movies will be interactive
and interlinked. It will be united by
bridges of transclusion (see below) and we
need a world-wide network to deliver it with
royalty. I begin.

. . . . .

February,
1988. Autodesk buys the Xanadu project,
which has been bundled into XOC, Inc. Nelson
gives up the trademark.

LATE 1988
the program designed in 1981 is finished
(and dubbed 88.1), then set aside, to begin
work on a MUCH FINER design-

August,
1992. Autodesk drops the project and gives
us carfare. Our heroes find themselves out
in the street.

Magazine: Nelson's
response to the Web was "nice try". Nelson: This is a
pretty seriously out-of-context quote. I have great respect for the
Web and great personal liking for Tim Berners-Lee.

..after the Advisory Committee meeting of the
WWW Consortium, in Tokyo, June 1997. This one
[photo] was made by
Hakon Lie at dinner.

It shows me [Robert Cailliau], sitting between Tim Berners-Lee and
Ted Nelson. Tim and Ted are clearly
engaged in a serious debate about some hypertext
phenomenon behind my back, while I'm discussing
philosophy with Hakon, who was sitting opposite
me and took the photo."

By R. Cailliau: "Tim, Robert and Ted"

The picture was taken by
me [Hakon Wium Lie] in June 97 in
the top-floor restaurant of Hotel Shingawa Prince in Tokyo. The
table had just finished a "Hokkaido wedding dinner" when this
amazing scene revealed itself in front of me. Thankfully there was
one last picture left in my "film with lens".

Tim and Ted are clearly talking behind Robert's back, but Robert
doesn't seem to mind. Maybe because he had just presented his latest
theory about religion in Europe, and -- given that scale -- even
hypertext theories fall short.

Lack
of transparent support for mirroring Lack of an underlying distributed file
system Lack of bivisibility and bifollowability
Lack of versioning and alternates
Limited support for metadata Limited support for Computer Mediated
Communication Cyberspace/"Hyperspace" as
a pervasive user interface metaphor Limited support for transclusions
Transcopyright - the Xanadu solution for
business on the Net - New financial
instruments for the new media

Nelson:Trying to fix HTML is
like trying to graft arms and legs onto
hamburger...

"The problem is how to clean up the mess
that isstrewn around us.... We have the World WideWeb with all sorts of marvelous new
conceptualmethods proposed every month, all of themcontradictory," said Nelson.

"I come from a slightly different position
[than theWeb], where we have long presented andimplemented an integrated solution for all
of theseproblems in parallel, which will eventually
prevailonce people understand it," Nelson said.

Hypertext Guru Has New Spin on Old
Plans, Wired, 17.Apr.98.by James
Glave

Xanadu Timeline:

1960
Ted Nelson's designs showed two
screen windows connected by visible
lines, pointing from parts of an
object in one window to
corresponding parts of an object in
another window. No existing
windowing software provides this
facility even today.

1965
Nelson's design concentrated on the
single-user system and was based on
"zipper lists", sequential lists of
elements which could be linked
sideways to other zipper lists for
large non-sequential text
structures.

1970
Nelson invented certain data
structures and algorithms called the
"enfilade" which became the basis
for much later work (still
proprietary to Xanadu Operating
Company, Inc.)

1972
Implementations ran in both Algol
and Fortran.

1974
William Barus extended the enfilade
concept to handle interconnection.

1979
Nelson assembled a new team (Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller, Stuart Greene,
Roland King and Eric Hill) to
redesign the system.

1981 K. Eric Drexler created a new
data structure and algorithms for
complex versioning and connection
management.

The Project Xanadu team
completed the design of a
universal networking server for
Xanadu, described in various
editions of Ted Nelson's book
"Literary Machines" ...

1983 Xanadu Operating Company, Inc.
(XOC, Inc.) was formed to complete
development of the 1981 design.

1988 XOC, Inc. was acquired by
Autodesk, Inc. and amply funded,
with offices in Palo Alto and later
Mountain View California. Work
continued with Mark Miller as chief
designer. ..

1992
Autodesk entered into the throes of
an organisational shakeup and
dropped the project, after
expenditures on the order of five
million US dollars. Rights to
continued development of the XOC
server were licensed to Memex, Inc.
of Palo Alto, California and the
trademark "Xanadu" was re-assigned
to Nelson.

1993
Nelson re-thought the whole thing
and respecified Xanadu publishing as
a system of business arrangements.
Minimal specifications for a
publishing system were created under
the name "Xanadu Light", and Andrew
Pam of Serious Cybernetics in
Melbourne, Australia was licensed to
continue development as Xanadu
Australia.

1994
Nelson was invited to Japan and
founded the Sapporo HyperLab...

By Andrew Pam, Xanadu Australia

The
Xanadu database makes it possible to
address any substring of any
document from any other document.

This requires an even stronger
addressing scheme than the Universal
Resource Locators used in the
World-Wide Web.

Every single byte (character) in
every document (in the whole world)
needs a unique address.

Xanadu will never delete any text.

It keeps a permanent record of all
versions of every document. This is
necessary because someone may have
created links to parts of a specific
version of a document, which may no
longer be present in later versions
of that document.

Xanadu uses a sophisticated
versioning system that requires only
one version (the current one) of a
document to be stored completely. By
keeping a record of the changes made
to the document, other versions can
be generated on the fly.

Ted
Nelson and Xanadu, by Paul De Bra

...epic
tragedy:

It was
the most radical computer dream of the
hacker era.

Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed
to be the universal, democratic
hypertext library that would help human
life evolve into an entirely new form.

Instead, it sucked Nelson and his
intrepid band of true believers into
what became the longest-running
vaporware project in the history of
computing -

a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and
heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy.

The Curse
of Xanadu, Wired 3.06, 1995, by Gary
Wolf

Wolf calls
the general idea that we need freedom and
availability of information to avoid
disaster a "very hackerish assumption."

Perhaps. But it is an ideal I believe in,
bound up with the ideals I learned from the
Pledge
of Allegiance in grade school. Ironically,
that ideal seemed to be what Wired stood
for. Wolf's piece is a perfect example of
such a disaster.

Ted
Nelson,Wired, 3.09

Nelson and
his colleagues of Project Xanadu pioneered
in issues of distributed hypermedia,
distributed documents and evolving edit
systems. It can be argued that HyperCard,
World Wide Web, Lotus Notes and much of
"multimedia" all derive from this work.

Nelson's theories of software center around
arbitrary Virtuality, which he divides into
conceptual structure and feel. He condemns
"metaphors" as presently used, and instead
advocates the design of deep new construct
logics

Ted Nelson, Be-In, 1996

I
continue to hold exactly to my
original vision, that
transclusive hypermedia will be
the publishing medium of the
future, under whatever brand
name.

There are far more varieties of
interactive media than anyone
has yet tried; but I believe
that open transmedia - unique in
power to aid understanding and
to solve the copyright issue -
represents a vital singularity
in the great family of media
cosmologies; until this is
disproven,
I continue to stake my life and
career on it. If I am right
about the centrality of
transclusion to the media of the
future, it may all have been
worth it, and we will see who
understood media design after
all.

Ted
Nelson, Wired, 3.09

One profound insight can be
extracted from the long and
sometimes painful Xanadu story:
the most powerful results often
come from constraining ambition
and designing only
microstandards on top of which a
rich exploration of applications
and concepts can be supported. That's
what has driven the Web and its
underlying infrastructure, the Internet.

WHR estimates
the percent of
content active
part of Internet
community. By
other words, WHR
reflects what is
the percent of
Web surfing
people are
trying to become the Web
authors by
creating their
own Web sites.
So we ( - G.R.G)
consider the WHR
as a creative
temperature of
Web

Internet
traffic grew
more than
100% in 2001 from 48
PB/month to
100 PB/month
(PB =
Petabyte or
1,000,000,000,000,000
bytes). This growth
continues in
2002.

Majority of
users -- 84%,
according to
the National
Telecommunications
and
Information
Administration's
report: A
Nation
Online,
Feb 2002 --
connecting
to the
Internet for
email
or instant
messaging
services...By John
Ryan of RHK,
Inc. 2002

Internet Traffic
Growth, by Larry
Roberts

-Traffic is
for US
backbone
network, not
including
local calls,
for both
Internet and
PSTN;-Traffic
growth is
higher than
host growth
because the
traffic/host
ratio growth
at 14
percentage
per year

Lawrence G. Roberts:
One of the leading founders of the basic
technical basement of Internet - packet network: "... was responsible
for the design, initiation, planning and development of ARPANET, the
world’s first major packet network, the predecessor to Internet, while
the Director of Information Processing Techniques for DARPA. After ARPA,
... founded the world’s first packet data comm carrier, Telenet, and
was the CEO from 1973 to 1980. Telenet was sold to GTE in 1979 and
subsequently became the data division of Sprint...

...
more
data than voice
conversations now
take place daily on
British
Telecommunications
Plc's domestic
network ...
traditional
telephone calls were
being replaced by
electronic mail
(e-mail) ... ...
increased use of
e-mail, electronic
commerce
(e-commerce) and
multimedia services
in addition to
conventional and
mobile telephony
would double the
size of the British
communications
market from its
current $49.62
billion within five
years Yahoo!
News:
Technology
Headlines,
November
5, 1998

Why
Hosts? Because there is not
any other ways to
count the Internet
populations at all:
"No one has any clue
how many users there
are, but most people
would agree that
there is at least
one user per host."
Internet Domain
Survey. The Nua
Ltd.

Estimated
number
of web
users in
the
U.S.:
57,037,000 Win Treese ,
May 1998

...the
active
number
of
Internet
users in
the
United
States
is only
37
million,
well
below
the
widely
reported
range of
50
million
to 70
million
seen in
most
published
reports.
Bits &
Bytes,
by
Michael
Bush ,
July,
1998.

...
about 15
million
of the
total 23 million
U.S.
households
on the
Internet
receive
their
online
service
through
AOL.AOL Eyes
Half Of
All New
Online
Users,
September,
1998

So, according to
" Irresponsible
Internet
Statistics...", .. there is no
absolute way to
measure any
statistic
regarding the
growth of the
Internet. As
John Quarterman
of MIDS says:

The
Internet
is
distributed
by
nature.
This is
its
strongest
feature,
since no
single
entity
is in
control,
and its
pieces
run
themselves,
cooperating
to form
the
network
of
networks
that is
the
Internet.
However,
because
no
single
entity
is
control,
nobody
knows
everything
about
the
Internet.
Measuring
it is
especially
hard
because
some
parts
choose
to limit
access
to
themselves
to
various
degrees.
So,
instead
of
measurement,
we have
various
forms of
surveying
and
estimation.

So all the
statistics
presented here
are based on
estimates and
conjecture. And
even if they
were absolutely
true, growth
rates change. I
(Robert
Orenstein) read
somewhere (if
you know where I
saw this, please
tell me) that
there is only
one conclusion
that can
possibly be
drawn from such
vague data: The
Internet
is
getting
big, and it's
happening
fast.

So, "the
Internet is getting big,..." Is it always
good?

Percentage
of U.S.
public
schools
connected
to the
Internet

1994

35

1996

65

Data
source:
WinTrees

In a poll
taken early
last year
(1996 -ed.)
U.S.
teachers
ranked
computer
skills and
media
technology
as more
"essential"
than the
study of
European
history,
biology,
chemistry,
and physics;
than dealing
with social
problems
such as
drugs and
family
breakdown;
than
learning
practical
job skills;
and than
reading
modern
American
writers such
as Steinbeck
and
Hemingway or
classic ones
such as
Plato and
Shakespeare.

... The
Kittridge
Street
Elementary
School, in
Los Angeles,
killed its
music
program last
year to hire
a technology
coordinator;
...
Mansfield,
Massachusetts,
administrators
dropped
proposed
teaching
positions in
art, music,
and physical
education,
and then
spent
$333,000 on
computers;
in one
Virginia
school the
art room was
turned into
a computer
laboratory.
(Ironically,
a half dozen
preliminary
studies
recently
suggested
that music
and art
classes may
build the
physical
size of a
child's
brain, and
its powers
for subjects
such as
language,
math,
science, and
engineering
-- in one
case far
more than
computer
work did.)
...

The Computer
Delusion ,
by Todd
Oppenheimer,
The Atlantic
Monthly;
July 1997

Your
site is riveting history - but, what are the
practical differences between the Internet and the
World Wide Web?

You
describe a continuous evolution of a system and I,
for one, don't know the practical differences
between the manmade information links whose terms
are commonly bandied about in the press.

Please respond - enquiring minds want to know.

Sincerely,
Bruce
D. Clyne

Dear
Bruce,

... The
Internet is a global networks' system that consist
of the millions of local area networks (LANs) and
computers (hosts). So it's a tech system that is working according to
the basic computer science concepts and rules. It
was developed 25 - 30 years ago.

The
WWW is only one of the ways of practical
implementations of the Internet.

Some
of the other ways are the following ones: gophers --
the dispersed system of menu driven subject oriented
data bases; ftp -- the remote files' exchange
system; email systems, and so on...

The
WWW (that was born 5 years ago) is a method (and
system) that provides the members of the Internet's
community with historically new opportunity to
create and permanently develop the global field of
the texts (as well as images, animations, sounds,
etc.), all parts of which are able to crossconnect
with each others.

In
other words, the WWW is a fast growing (millions of
authors are adding new pages every day) global field
of text that consist of billions of words (as well
as sounds, images, animations, ... etc.) all (!)
parts (every of billions of WORDs) of which are able
to realtime crossconnect and interact with each
others.

As it
was mentioned by Alberto Cavicchiolo, "the network
is not a computer science concept, but a linguistic
concept".

I
often quote this definition, even though I do not
fully agree with it. From my viewpoint the network itself is definitely a
computer science concept. The Internet is a computer
science concept as well as biological concept.

...
the Web (!) only "... is not a computer science
concept, but a linguistic concept".

So my
definition of the Web is the following one:

The
Web is a method (and technology) of the global
WORDS' fields dynamic crossconnection and
interaction (again, I mean the words, as well as all
other communication symbols: the images, animations,
sounds and so on...).

The
Web uses the Internet to store, locate and connect
the WORDS as some of the others more tradition
methods of the WORDS's connection used the stones,
skins, papyruses, papers, phone, recorders, radio,
TV ...

The
phone teleconferences, some of the radio and TV
shows and tele-reportages were partly using the
Web's basic hyperlink approach.

The
hyperlinks concept itself was known for thousands of
years . For instance, some of the Bible stories
include different source stories inside the main
story, and those source stories contain some other
source stories and so on...

All
those well known attempts to use hyperlinks concept
had one technical disadvantage: they were based on
the static, fully prediscribed scenarios of the
WORDS' crossconnections.

There
were strong crossconnection levels limits, link's
delay time limits, and so on..

The
WWW has broken any limits for any WORDS'
crosconnections.

After
that the "chain reaction" of crossconnections was
launched...

For
instance, according to the Sun Microsystems'
statistics "the total number of the Internet's sites crossconnections more than doubled every month".
(Sun press-seminar , January 1995, Mountain View,
CA).

. . .
Once again, thank you for your interest.

Sincerely,
Gregory Gromov

The Net
is a unique creation of human intelligence.

... the
first intelligent artificial organism.

...
represents the growth of a new society within the old.

...
represents a new model of governance.

...
represents a threat to civil liberties.

... the
greatest free marketplace of ideas that has ever
existed.

The Net
is in imminent danger of extinction.

The Net
is immortal.

By Henry
Edward Hardy The History of the Net, Master's Thesis, September 28, 1993

The growth of the Net is not a
fluke or a fad, but the consequence of
unleashing the power of individual creativity.
If it were an economy, it would be the triumph
of the free market over central planning. In
music, jazz over Bach. Democracy over
dictatorship... by
Christopher Anderson. The Economist Newspaper Limited.

I feel
most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too
profound for human intellect... Let each man hope and
believe what he can.~
Charles Darwin

Epilogue and Prologue ...

The
Web 's Way
to the WORD's WORLD

In the
beginning was the WORD ...

The WWW creates a multidimencional Web of Roads.

Those
Roads have their beginning at the civilization that was
raised on a concept of a plane BOOK; the civilization
that has existed for thousands of years.

The Hyperlinks
-- Roads of World Wide Web -- lead from a BOOK of a plane text to
the multidimencional Universe of WORDs, to the WORD's
WORLD, which becomes the kernel concept of the next
civilization...

If
all this seems like a wild idea, that means you
understand it. These are times wild with
possibility.Ted Nelson, 1982

For a history of the Internet readers should consult Gregory Gromov's The Roads and Crossroads of the Internet's History. Virtual Seminar
for Teaching Literature.Internet Teaching 1. Some Basic Concepts.
Humanities Computing Unit of Oxford University,

Oxford University
UK, 1996

_________

This is one of the Great Classic Websites. It's a history of the
Internet and what led up to it, told in hypertext, both eloquently
and chaotically, as strange in its own way as the Mel Brooks movie,
History of the World, Part One. But it's one [REDACTED} of a lot
more accurate than the Brooks movie. All Internet users, even those
of you who just signed up for Web-TV or AOL last week and are still
fumbling around, should check out this site.

When you jump into this online
story, make sure you have a couple of hours free. It takes that long
to read. Imagine a collaborative writing project that tells you
more than you ever wanted to know (and more than probably thought
there was to tell) about the Internet, starting with the laying of
the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic in 1858 (which was NOT
a success, BTW).

You'll learn why the WWW
Consortium [W3C] is based at a physics lab in Switzerland called
CERN, instead of at a computer research center where you'd logically
expect it to be, and why CERN doesn't even stand for the lab's real
name -- in either English or French, along with lots of other neat
factoids that'll come in handy if you ever find yourself playing
Trivial Pursuit: The Internet Edition.

There's also a
picture of Al and Tipper Gore at their wedding, twenty years before
the WWW came into existence. And I'm not going to tell you why it's
there. You can find out for yourself. (And if you want to be a
killjoy you can post the reason below ..)by Robin Miller. Best High-Tech Sights on the Net! 26
Oct.1998

.Read The Roads and
Crossroads of Internet 's History, Gregory R. Gromov, et al. This is
a hypertext of nine main pages with side links. It is written as a
kind of mosaic rather than as a straight narrative, including email
questions and answers, fragments of interviews, and the like. It
focuses primarily on the Web and hypertext over the Internet...

by M. C. Morgan. College of
Arts and Letters, Department of English.
Bemidji State University, MN

_________

The Roads and
Crossroads of Internet 's History by Gregory R. Gromov... is an
excellent history of the internet and a good example of a "web
document." ... You
also should experience what "hypertext" is and why this experience
is more like exploring than reading. But just like an exploration,
it is up to you how extensively you explore. And just like any
explorer you may end up "lost." Don't panic, just click on one of
the links at the top of the window to return to one of the "pages"
in the document. There are links at the top to each of the nine
parts to this document. Now go explore and
remember what you're looking for:
-an understanding of the history of the internet.
-the experience of exploring a topic through the internet.

Robert Melczarek.
Introduction for EDU 606
School of Education
Troy State University, Dothan

_________

The Roads and Crossroads of the Internet's
History. By Gregory R. Gromov. A critically acclaimed site for a
comprehensive history of the Internet.

The University of Texas, System Digital Library.

_________

For anyone who has
ever wondered how and why the Internet was created comes this
extensive essay, "The Roads and Crossroads of Internet's History."
With this document, users can follow the development of the Net from
its early stages as a military communication system to the
multimedia extravaganza we know today.

Webcrawler:
Internet User Guides Reviews
*Hot* Web Sites, 1996

_________

... an excellent 9-part review of
the Internet's history and its relationship with the information
revolution. Very informative and quite amusing at times too! CADVision Development
Corporation

_________

An excellent summary
of key milestones in Internet history.

BellSouth. 1996

_________

History of the Internet. We all need it. We all want it. But how did
it happen in the first place? Gregory Gromov provides a ... brief
(one page) and comprehensive (nine page) history of the Worldwide
Web before it was the Net we all know and love...

By Matthew Holt, NetworkWorld
June, 1997

_________

If you've ever
wondered how the Internet came into being then be sure to check this
site out...If you've never wondered how the Internet came into being
then go anyway. You shouldn't be such a barbarian. Hitch a lift with
us on the information superhighway LineOne, UK

_________

... A must for someone
researching the evolution of the Net.

Jason Parkhill The Historian
and the Internet Bibliography College of Wooster, Ohio.

_________

Gregory R. Gromov's version is a
fun to read and thoughtful look into the history of the Internet and
the WWW. The Maine Science and Technology Foundation.
USM - Professional Development Center

_________

Access the website
designed by Gregory R. Gromov ... Study all nine
(9) pages ... as well as:
1. Road #1 "Information Age’s Milestones"
2. Road #2 "Internet at CERN: 1976 - 1990"
3. Road #3 "The 50 Years of the Hypertext Concept’s Evolution"
7. The team should write two or three questions regarding the
history of the Internet... Write your questions based on Gromov’s
website.

The Individual
Learner Within American Culture, by Larry Garrett,
Social Foundations of American Education. Troy State University.
Florida,1998

_________

Read through your
history- wonderful!Dionne Dames. 25 Oct 1998

_________

Hi, I don't mean to
be mean, but your website is very hard to understand. Next time you
make a website about the history of something, don't jump around as
much! You confused the hell out of me.SCU Computer Lab. Santa Clara University. 28 Sep 1998

_________

This site is a
genuine pleasure to use! Thank you.Don Hester. 14 Sep 1998 22:59:13 -0700

_________

A somewhat wild and wacky history of the internet.... EBEAB: Internet History. by Marcus Kazmierczak

_________

Gregory Gromov provides
an impressionistic overview in "The Roads and Crossroads of
Internet's History," ... with a particular concentration on the
development of hypertext and the Web. Current
Literature of the online community by Eron Main ErmineTech Ltd,
Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto

tnx for your
wonderful history of the inet, by far the best I have seen Tom Lamb.
26 Oct 1998 06:06:39 -0800

_________

Thank you for telling
the history of the internet in a manner that I could comfortably
read, follow and understand. You guys were obviously in touch with
your potential target audience.Jens Morrison
13 Apr 1999 18:40:31

_________

Thank you for the
great site (and sight), friendly, easy to read and gives a new
perspective on the NetJazz Veld
12 Apr 1999 14:38:31

_________

... Well done on an
interesting and informative piece of workSimon Cockroft
12 Apr 1999 15:52:15

_________

Gregory R. Gromov’s The Roads and
Crossroads of Internet History is probably the history that most
students will enjoy as it is sprinkled liberally with files that
illustrate his points.Commencing with Internet pre-history work your way
through 9 sections to read about the web, browser wars, and Xanadu
to name a few topics. It is a long essay but extremely interesting.

The Australian National University.
Faculty of Art, Canberra

_________

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History - Gregory Gromov's comprehensive
and fascinating overview of the philosophy and history of the
Internet.

Finally, an entertaining and eye-catching approach to Internet
history is Gregory R. Gromov's History of Internet and WWW: The
Roads and Crossroads of Internet History. This site is worth
visiting, as much for its unorthodox approach using dazzling visuals
and hypertext style as its content.

The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History by
Gregory Gromov ... can be a great resource where an informed ‘Net surfer can come
and let hypertext do the walking and the inventors of the ‘Net
themselves do the talking.

"Nettalk : A Brief History of the
'Net" by Kelly Ward. The Bulletin. Special Libraries
Association, San Francisco Bay region.
The School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) -- a
graduate program at the
University of California, Berkeley.

_________

For anyone who
has ever wondered how and why the Internet was created comes this
extensive essay, "The Roads and Crossroads of Internet's History."
With this document, users can follow the development of the Net from
its early stages as a military communication system to the
multimedia extravaganza we know today.